Human–Machine Shared Line-of-Sight Path Following Control of Intelligent Surface Vehicles

Cooperative steering of the captain and automated system can effectively reduce the necessity of extremely accurate environment perception of intelligent surface vehicles (ISVs), and enhance the safety and fault-tolerance of decision-making and motion control. This paper presents a human-machine shared line-of-sight (LOS) path following control method of under-actuated ISVs in complex sea environments with dynamic and static obstacles. At the kinematics level, a human-machine shared LOS guidance law is presented based on a dynamic authority mechanism determined by a shared weighted coefficient. The proposed guidance law not only preserves the simplicity and interpretation of the LOS guidance, but also enables the ISVs to combine the complementary strengths of the captain and the automated system. At the kinetic level, an adaptive extended state observer (AESO) is developed to estimate model uncertainties and environmental disturbances, and a model-free kinetic control method is constructed based on the AESO. By using the input-to-state stability theory, uniformly and ultimately bounded of the closed-loop system is analyzed. The simulation results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the human-machine shared LOS path following control method.